In the past, in a store such as a supermarket or a convenience store, a store clerk supplies commodities to display shelves on the basis of data of a point of sale (POS) system. In the POS system, a POS terminal generates sales data of settlement target commodities. An information processing apparatus such as a store computer subjects the sales data to registration processing. The display shelves, the POS terminal, and the store computer are provided in areas apart from one another in the store.
A user operates the store computer, checks the transition of sales of commodities and determines necessity of supply of the commodities to the display shelves and timing for the supply. The user predicts future sales of the commodities from the transition of the sales of the commodities. However, since the user does not grasp, for example, actual states of the display shelves, the user cannot supply commodities according to an actual situation of a sales floor.
Therefore, there is a system that picks up images of the same sales floor with cameras set in the sales floor at a time interval and detects time-series differences among the images as degrees of decrease in commodities (see JP-A-2002-24514). However, in this system, a user cannot check the transition of sales of commodities that decrease in the sales floor. It is not easy for the store clerk to check an actual situation of the sales floor in each hour such as the number of commodities displayed on displays shelves in the sales floor. To accurately predict future sales of commodities, the user needs to grasp, for example, flows of customers moving around the store holding commodities without making a payment. However, an actual situation of the sales floor in each hour and the transition of sales from sales data cannot be compared. Therefore, it is not easy to grasp, for example, the flows of customers.